Mister Dilsby

Sure, and I believe there is a difference between "incredibly destructive piece of machinery" and "weapon". Would a Kerbal engineer build a "gun"? Definitely, if he saw a need to hurl small, unguided projectiles with some accuracy. Maybe as part of a "Whack-a-Sattelite" program to clear up debris in LKO. Would he ever aim it at a fellow Kerbal in anger? Never! Kerbals don't have the capacity for intentional violence! But would he accidentally obliterate some poor Kerbonaut who happened to stray into his path while he was gunning down debris? Absolutely! As long as there's no blood, just a puff of dust and #lolsokerbal.

@netbumbler, welcome to the Forum and I'm pleased to give you your first +rep for that sweet-looking spaceplane. Am curious where/how you use the turbojets since they don't seem to be running at liftoff.

Did Red get so much rep the odometer flipped around to zero?

See, we're not just funny--we're educational! Hey, if you haven't found tvtropes.org yet it's an excellent time-waster. Here's their article on that subject. And while you're waiting for my next update you can find lots of articles about the Hummlebee's crew! Here's one for Bill, and one for Lisa ... I suppose Jeb's is obvious; Val is on that page also, and has this one all to herself.

Noooooo!!! I suppose F9 is out of the question?

I don't play with any of these parts so it's hard to get a feel for Kron-- but I do have a soft spot for Bill, and those glasses are spectacular! Ministry will just have to deal with it.

You guys are the best, thanks Two more pages! So yeah, the drill reduced load overnight but never completely shut down. Panels were sometimes blocked by parts of the ship, and yes even once by Ike which is tidally locked to a different part of Duna. So I think that maybe Duna's solar "collision mesh" does not go below a certain altitude--the panels were definitely offline overnight in the Highlands.

Yup, did that, but did not get the plane back. Granted the "booster" plane used rockets not jets, but similar principle.

I went with "just doesn't feel right". Of course I say this, and I write a comic where the main characters are all "officers" in an organization called "Kerbfleet" and have words like "Majer", "Looey", "Enzin", or"Comder" in front of their names. Allow me to explain I think that Kerbals are essentially meant to be human-like, but with all human traits removed that would be inconvenient for space exploration. Human traits that interfere with spaceflight include: limited lifespan need for air, water and food desire for comfort desire for wealth basic regard for personal safety belief that life has, or should have any purpose other than spaceflight and, of course, the capacity to willingly harm one another Let's face it, if we humans removed all the above from our programming we could have put a person on Mars within ten years of Yuri Gagarin. Of course we would have blown up a few dozen people trying, but we wouldn't have cared! Instead we were distracted by our other desires in life, and we spent all too much of our energy on violence and the threat of violence. And here we are. So I have this thing called "Kerbfleet" in my comic, and it has all of the cool trappings of a military organization but none of the awful stuff having to do with war and violence. Is this reasonable? Certainly not! But none of it is reasonable, is it? Rather, I say it is unreasonable to give Kerbals any of those human traits listed above and expect them to be able to run a space program as we've come to expect in KSP...except maybe the need for food, because I've been playing with USI-LS and it's pretty cool.

Well now I HAVE to do it... or else be sensible and just put a little more fuel in my TRJ+LVN SSTO... no, no, that's not Kerbal enough.

Oh, guaranteed! I have to keep it interesting; there's three more biomes to visit, and I'm not going to get any +rep for 11 consecutive pages of ore mining/STOL shots.

Well let's see... mass is a bit under 6t, thrust 2kN, so it adds one m/s every 2.85 seconds. If the total dV required to get to Jool is about 2000, then I'm looking at 90+ minutes of burn. Eh, yeah, that's pretty awful.Hey, if only there were a table somewhere of precomputed low-TWR interplanetary transfer burns... ETA: I didn't lose a decimal before, I inverted. Was frantically trying to correct before you replied

How about 11 tons, 27 parts, and 3800 m/s dV left in LKO? Have not taken it to Laythe yet, but it can definitely get there. I might also try tuning the ascent profile to save a little jet fuel for the destination. I give you... the Kooljer 2! (electric boogaloo)

I hear you--though don't forget that the setup with my mod also requires a 4.25 ton ISRU converter, ore storage, and two mini-greenhouses per kerbal I wanted to add the mulch-->ore capability because frankly I couldn't see how to use the greenhouses with the USI LS mod as a standalone... with no source of mulch other than the kerbals, and the round trip of noms-->kerbals-->mulch-->greenhouse-->noms being intentionally lossy all the greenhouse can do is make the NOMS stretch a bit. Have not worked it out, but I bet you would do better leaving the greenhouses at home and carrying more NOMS.

Winner! I suppose if Gene had said it again AFTER the landing you would have gotten it right away.

No stock ship will get near c, true, but it would actually be relevant to account for the time and mass dilation effects caused by gravity. This effect was measured in the Apollo missions and even in high-altitude atmospheric ships. Basically, for the game to be correct time has to move at different rates for all ships depending on which SOI they're in. For a ship on a long trajectory to Jool, time experienced by those Kerbals would differ from time experienced at KSC by... well... several seconds, maybe. Yeah, let's just fix the fairings and the wheels first.

Well you must know it, because you just quoted a version of it in your own post

Glad you liked, thanks! I had indeed considered Beagle but didn't think I could work it in-universe (not even via my sometimes-avatar Bill) - - - Updated - - - That's not a stock part

Structurally unsound? Pffft, awesome looks FTW! Looking forward to seeing what Bob did for the 'good' one. Hopefully there are still random I-beams sticking out of the cockpit, I do not see enough of that in lander designs

Thanks! Here's a couple more: - - - Updated - - - Didn't see this comment before, sorry--but there is one more in there you missed! (it's a Leslie Nielsen line)At some point Shirley Kerman will have to make a cameo appearance

This. There is such a thing as "aesthetic clipping". There is also such a thing as "the game lets me overlap enough tanks to get twice as much fuel in the same space as stock intent, so why not lol?

Very nice, glad they all arrived on station all right. Very useful notes on aerocapture as well! Duna is indeed 'meh' for ore... hoping to get some faster refuels in the poles than I have been in the lowlands/highlands. Also appreciate the notes on the fairings bugs.

Well that's ambitious! I'm sure you already know some tricks to make the long burn time more manageable, but one of my favorites is what I call the "swingset maneuver" a.k.a. periapsis pump. Set your maneuver node for Kerbin escape/Jool transfer (or Joel, whatever ) but don't do the burn all on one orbit. Instead, do your first burn for just a few minutes (half before and half after the node, of course), then reset the node, make another orbit, and repeat. Start doing this a few days before your ideal transfer window so that you can give the ship that last kick right on time. I did a transfer like this for my Eve mission in 0.90, and was even able to refuel the ship before the final kick. (needed to, as a design problem prevented me using the LV-Ns and i had to transfer on aerospikes. You can also transfer from Minmus orbit if it's the right day of the 'minth' at much lower cost than from LKO, and of course you can fuel in LMO. Since you will need far less dV departing from an altitude of 46,400 km your burn will not be nearly as long. Hopefully some combination of this and heat management will get you there--good luck!

Yeah, Duna is really great now though controlled winged flight can still be squirrelly with a 55t ship... my aerocapture was 24km, no problems, never even saw a heat effect.

Some 'rover'! Do you have the port/starboard airbrakes on independent AGs, or do they deploy individually like that on their own for yaw control?